Best Defense

Washington’s bipartisan foreign-policy elite is worried. Neocons, liberal interventionists, and conservative hawks are all fretting about the specter of “isolationism” in the Tea Party. Facing a plucky band of freshmen congressmen who have expressed few clear views about the defense budget, the new chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, has pledged that he is going to “educate” new members on the need to keep military spending right where it is. McKeon promises he “will not support any measures that stress our forces and jeopardize the lives of our men and women in uniform”—except, presumably, America’s wars.

Into this fray steps Robert Kagan with a sprawling cover story in the Weekly Standard defending America’s “benevolent global hegemony” and urging increased military spending. You have to give it to Kagan: he’s taken on a tough task. With the country mired in two treadmill-style wars, staring down red ink as far as the eye can see, and increasing numbers of Americans realizing our real problems are here at home, arguing for keeping military spending turned up to 11 is a challenge.

His argument centers on three claims. First, Kagan alleges that America faces a dire threat environment in which a more restrained strategy would only amplify the dangers. Second, he argues that cutting military spending can’t solve our fiscal dilemma. And finally, he asserts that America simply cannot change its grand strategy, for we have always been interventionists.

Each claim is wrong: America could make substantial changes to its grand strategy that would save hundreds of billions of dollars per year without endangering our national security.

Secure Superpower

Kagan correctly points out that the only way to save real money on the military is to ask it to do fewer things. But because America faces an “elevated risk of terrorist attack” and an “increasingly dangerous international environment,” he thinks strategic restraint would be perilous.

This song is getting old, especially coming from Kagan. In May 2000, he and William Kristol warned of the “emerging dangers” in China, Russia, Iraq, Serbia, and North Korea, saying that these problems were “proving more troubling” than the two had expected in their famous Foreign Affairs article in 1996. In retrospect, of course, the tone that was tellingly missing from this chorus of alarm bells was Afghanistan and al-Qaeda, the one true threat to the United States at that time.

Eleven years later, just how bad is the threat environment? Is the United States militarily insecure by any reasonable historical measure? Is our sovereignty in doubt, like the nations of Central Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries? Or how does America’s threat environment compare to that of, say, present-day Israel—or present-day Iran? Kagan defines dangerous down. In fact, the United States is the most secure great power in modern history.

The U.S. will remain for years the world’s largest economy. It accounts for nearly half of the planet’s military spending. (Add in allies with a formal treaty commitment to America and the figure is closer to 70 percent.) We possess near ideal geography, with two weak, friendly neighbors to the north and south and two large moats to the west and east. America bristles with nuclear weapons. The threat of territorial conquest is zero.

Since the 9/11 attacks, Kagan has had an easier time threat-mongering, using terrorism as the justification for our towering military spending and activist grand strategy. But given his history of crying wolf, it is no surprise that he’s inflating this threat, too. That’s particularly problematic, given that terrorist’s best weapon is our tendency to overreact and score own-goals, like the war in Iraq.

Only a tiny fraction of U.S. military spending has anything to do with terrorism. Virginia class submarines and V-22 Ospreys kill few terrorists. Even the large ground forces needed to sustain nation-building projects in Muslim countries have little counterterrorism utility, serving to make us targets of terrorism rather than preventing it, as political scientist Robert Pape has argued.

Washington could easily scale back its overseas ambitions and save significant money in the process. To his credit, Kagan acknowledges that an entire school of thinkers—academic realists—has consistently offered a fundamentally different vision of American strategy since the end of the Cold War. Scholars like Eugene Gholz, Christopher Layne, John Mearsheimer, and Barry Posen have argued for a strategy of “offshore balancing” that would allow the United States to reduce military expenditures without compromising security.

These academics have suggested offloading responsibility for defending Europe to the Europeans and promoting stable balances of power in other regions, while retaining the world’s most powerful military as a hedge against unexpected trouble. Where another great power threatened to establish dominance in its region, the United States could intervene swiftly to restore the balance of power.

If the United States stopped providing security for wealthy clients like the European Union countries, Japan, South Korea, and Israel, they would orient their foreign policies away from free-riding on American taxpayers and toward defending themselves. Kagan implies that these powers might instead collapse: If the United States pulled in its horns, East Asian powers would “have to choose between accepting Chinese dominance and striking out on their own, possibly by building nuclear weapons.” Middle Eastern countries removed from the American security umbrella would face similar decisions with respect to Iran.

Missing from Kagan’s analysis is a shred of empathy for the states in question. Given the geography, history, and possible threats in question, these countries’ decisions to surrender or balance are remarkably easy choices to make. Nor does his claim jibe with international relations scholarship or history, both of which show that states tend to balance against threats rather than band-wagon with them.

The disconnect between the academy and the Beltway foreign-policy community could hardly be starker. Forty-five years ago, Mancur Olson and Richard Zeckhauser sketched what they termed the “economic theory of alliances.” They explained that when several countries join together to protect a shared interest, smaller members have an incentive to free ride in the presence of a much larger, wealthier partner. Once the large, wealthy partner has stated its own vital interest in the objective—in this example, security—smaller countries believe that the larger contributor will pay for the goal itself even in the absence of “fair” contributions from the other partners.

The basic insight has stood the test of time. Ignoring this reality, Washington blindly subsidizes allies’ domestic welfare programs by allowing them to channel resources away from self-defense. There are many terms that could describe this phenomenon, but “fiscal responsibility” is not one of them.

How Big a Stick?

Kagan would not merely hold military spending constant. He wants more. As he points out, given the sweeping ambition of American strategy, fulfilling our commitments indefinitely would require “almost certainly more than current force levels.” But he offers no suggestions on how to right-size our forces. Thus his argument collapses into a case for continuing a strategy that Kagan admits is insolvent.

One suspects that political reality prevented Kagan from openly proposing large increases in military spending. But he ignores that same constraint in suggesting that elected officials can slash domestic entitlements like Medicare and Social Security to solve long-term budgetary shortfalls.

In attempting to cordon off military expenditures, Kagan protests that the real source of American debt is our entitlement system, implying that deficit hawks should target those programs. But even Republicans prefer cutting military spending to tinkering with Medicare or Social Security. A January poll from CBS News and the New York Times asked, “if you had to choose one, which would you be willing to change in order to cut government spending?” Among Republicans, 42 percent said the military, 31 percent said Medicare, 17 percent said Social Security, and 10 percent stated no opinion.

Republicans on Capitol Hill recognize these preferences, which explains the charade where they preen before media cameras and claim that they will get tough on the deficit by cutting … foreign aid and earmarks. Political reality says that progress on the debt means putting military spending, which has nearly doubled in the last decade, on the table.

Kagan instead engages in creative mathematics, claiming that immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan combined with “cutting all the waste Gates can find” as well as several weapons systems “would still not produce a 10 percent decrease in overall defense spending.”

False. America is spending roughly $120 billion per year in Afghanistan alone, and military expenditures including the wars fall between $700 billion and $750 billion. My Cato Institute colleagues Benjamin Friedman and Christopher Preble recently unveiled a detailed plan for strategic change that would allow cuts of at least $1.2 trillion in military spending over the next 10 years. That would not fix the long-term fiscal shortfall, but it would help.

Destiny Manifest

Perhaps the strangest aspect of Kagan’s argument is his claim that although “almost every war or intervention the United States has engaged in throughout its history has been optional,” America is destined to pursue a grand strategy oriented toward global intervention. Kagan presents the history of American foreign policy since 1898 as one of almost constant foreign intervention and implies that America’s “wars of choice” are its destiny.

Wars can be either choices or destiny, but they cannot be both. Still, this is a tantalizingly provocative argument, one that brings Kagan close to revisionist diplomatic historians like Charles Beard, William Appleman Williams, William O. Walker III, and Richard Immerman. (Of course, these scholars see America’s tendency to intervene as a bug; Kagan views it as a feature.)

But if the United States is likely to follow an activist grand strategy for the foreseeable future, this is closely related to the behavior of prominent public intellectuals like Kagan himself. The marketplace of ideas about American strategy is, from the vantage point of the interested citizen, a monopoly.

Kagan’s C.V. represents the phenomenon well. A columnist at the Washington Post, a veteran of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century and Weekly Standard as well as the liberal interventionist Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who is now at the Brookings Institution, Kagan is the embodiment of the Beltway foreign-policy establishment. If enough people with those credentials amended their views on America’s grand strategy, it could change.

There are more prominent hawks in Washington named Kagan than there are prominent critics of the status quo in this town. Despite the superficially vicious battles between foreign-policy elites in Washington, these fights generally take place between the 7- and 10-yard lines of one half of the field. Critics in the academy rarely make their way into public discussion. To suggest that the Beltway debate represents genuinely conflicting views of strategy does a disservice to the notion of a “marketplace of ideas.”

Ironically, by acknowledging an informed opposition, Kagan himself shows the way toward changing American strategy. It lies in opening up the foreign-policy debate, above all in Washington itself.

Justin Logan is associate director of foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute.

“Intervention is our destiny” reeks of hubris that approaches madness. Kagan is in touch with reality insofar as his understanding that American interventions have seldom been necessary for the well-being of the country. That is a surprising concession given the prevalence of assertions that our troops are in far places to preserve our freedom.
Kagan’s realization does not awaken him to the astonishing megalomania his praise of manifest destiny represents. He and his fellow hawks are leading the nation into a disaster with their eyes wide open, making their error of judgment all the more blameworthy.
The mental sloth typifying the rest of the citizenry is only marginally, if any, better. We’ll all pay a high price for national arrogance some day soon, beyond the high price already paid. I tremble for my country as much as Jefferson ever did, much good it will do me. For now, probably the most I can do is to scorn the GOP I foolishly supported for too long a time, most of my long life, that is.

Re: “Ironically, by acknowledging an informed opposition, Kagan himself shows the way toward changing American strategy. It lies in opening up the foreign-policy debate, above all in Washington itself.”

Unfortunately, it’s never going to happen. The Neo-conservative community may be a feckless, sclerotic ghetto. But it is the flavor of conservatism that has been ordained as the authentic Manichean counterpart to Left by the mainstream media.

Not only will Andrew Bacevich, et al., not be invited members on the AEI/Brookings foreign policy discussion panels, the neo-con participants will never be queried by the MSM as to why the genuine conservatives are not represented at those symposia.

Much easier to ignore principled arguments than debate them. Especially when the ignorance is enabled by the homogeneous plutocracy in power.

What we need to do is to understand that at present we actually have both a Department of Defense and a Department of Offense, both run out of the Pentagon. The former is a matter of life and death, and we dare not short change it. The latter is a ruinously expensive luxury which we can no longer afford.

We are fortunate in not being bordered on land by potentially serious adversaries (at least for the past 150 years or so), but we are surrounded by the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic oceans, plus the Caribbean Sea. Thus, it is absolutely essential that we maintain a very strong navy. It just takes too long to build ships to be able to bring additional ones on line quickly, so we need to have a sufficient large and modern fleet to more than match any potential overseas adversary or combination of adversaries. Having a strong navy also requires having a strong marine corps, they are an integral part of naval operations. In this modern age, we also need a strong air force and a strong strategic deterrent. What we don’t need for defense is a large army. The National Guard plus a couple of air-mobile regular army divisions as a strategic reserve will do. Given all of the above, there is no way that US territory is going to come under serious threat of invasion before we are able to ramp up the size of our army in response.

Subtract out the above, and the very substantial forces that are left over constitute our “Department of Offense”. These are deployed around the world, but mostly on the mainland of Eurasia. We “need” these because of our proclivity for promises and interventions undertaken with reckless abandon over the past few decades.

If there is any cutting that needs to be done, the latter is where we should look — and indeed, we should go at it with a meat axe.

Of course, you can’t eliminate these forces without also terminating the commitments. Neither should be done overnight. There is a responsibe way to do this over the next few years. We can’t afford not to do it, though.

Pessimism acknowledged, but if enough of us took to the streets…like around the pentagon…and endured like Egyptians, I think more politicians on both sides of the aisle would be empowered and beltway armchair generals like Kagan would be trembling. It has been pouned home that voting is not going to take care of this problem. Something else is going to have to be needed to take back this country from people like Kagan.

If Andrew Bacevich, the Pauls, this writer and others would organize it, I’d find a way to be there. Make it a one-issue , we’re-not-going-anywhere-until-something-changes event, “Reclaim the nation from the empire builders” and let one and all join who share the concern. Throw in some state and local govs too and I really wonder what the reaction would be…

Excellent argument, and a real pleasure to read. Bravo & thank you Justin Logan.
One thing: you mention the threat posed by Tea Party Republicans to defense spending. Yet all–not most, but ALL–of the Tea Party freshmen in the House just voted against a bill that would have decimated funding of the Af-Pak war. Nearly half the Democrats (91) voted to reduce war funding (and these were the more liberal Dems) while those few (7) Republicans who voted likewise tended to be well-established paleocons like Ron Paul and John Duncan.
What gives? Hate to say it, but the expectation that the Tea Party will turn against Empire, a hope I see expressed frequently in TAC, seems a bit… wishful, and until now not in the least borne out by evidence. This paleocon/libertarian hope that the Tea Party will push for a less militarized foreign policy so far seems to be a mirror image of the liberals’ credulous hope that Obama would turn out to be an antiwar paladin.
Is it time yet to temper (or deep-six) hopes that the Tea Party is against empire/”global hegemony”/open-ended interventionism in any serious sense?
And if so, what then?

No neocon will accept anything less than US dominance everywhere. Anything less than that means Israel would have to deal with the requirements and opinions of peoples and powers that it doesn’t control.

Chase, I don’t think there is much wishful thinking about the Tea Party. It has been mostly co-opted by the Neo-Cons. That malignant infection is much deeper than Drs. Ron and Rand Paul could excise.

War monger militarists like Marco Rubio, Sarah Palin and the egregious Allen West have wrapped the Tea Party mantel around themselves. And the MSM has been only too happy to define that corrupt definition as being the authentic message of the Tea Party movement.

The Neo-Con puppeteers at the Weekly Standard and National Review must be gloating…

The deep contradiction in the “offensive realist” position qua Mearsheimer is that it recognizes the “stopping power of water” as an objective principle, while subjectively commending this “off-shore balancing” charade as a way to deal with regional balances of power. (Mearsheimer does not recognize that there is, or even can be a global hegemon, and so he reduces the balance of power to a regional condition.) Well, it should be intuitively obvious that if oceans protect us against our adversaries, then they also protect our adversaries against us. This is why the US defense posture is and always will be assymetric to any given Eurasian power – and it is also why the forward strategy must not be unilaterally abandoned. An inconvenient truth that does not admit itself into the Cato Institute’s world view – but Gates has terminated virtually every program that strengthened America’s strategic mobility and its ability to project power into the Eurasian landmass (outside the usual SOF and precision strike pinpricks). While any old strategist ought to be able to add and substract, the balance sheet increasingly reveals an unbalanced force. That said, we can expect things to take their normal course when the US conventional presence in Iraq and Afghanistan is a thing of the past. Events in Egypt and Libya ought to remind us that the world does not wait on the United States to write out its history.

“Providing security for wealthy states……..! What about the Pentagon protection racket funded by the forced contribution,withholding taxes, of the American taxpayers which provides protection for the INTERNATIONAL CORPORATOCRACY WEALTHY PREDATORY CAPITALIST WELthFARE KINGS many of which pay no USG taxes nor are American companies, whose worldwide assets are protected by the Pentagon protection rackets scheme of; fund US, the Pentagon, or else…..!The Pentagon is funded by the proceeds for the national debt and Admiral Mullen declared the national debt is a threat to national security. The forced contributions, taxes, from the American taxpayers fund a threat to national security to protect US from threats to national security. Catch 22. It is obvious that Kagan and his ilk are sociopathic psychopaths whose idea’s are so shallow and self serving it’s an insult to those exposed to his mindlessness nonsense. They use the propaganda of psychobabble mindlessness, well knowing that the American public has been brainwashed by the happy talk, pathological sociopathic propaganda of optimistic mindlessness orchestrated withby the MSM, especially TV.

“Providing security for wealthy states……..! What about the Pentagon protection racket funded by the forced contribution,withholding taxes, of the American taxpayers which provides protection for the INTERNATIONAL CORPORATOCRACY WEALTHY PREDATORY CAPITALIST WELthFARE KINGS many of which pay no USG taxes nor are American companies, whose worldwide assets are protected by the Pentagon protection rackets scheme of; fund US, the Pentagon, or else…..!The Pentagon is funded by the proceeds for the national debt and Admiral Mullen declared the national debt is a threat to national security. The forced contributions, taxes, from the American taxpayers fund a threat to national security to protect US from threats to national security. Catch 22. It is obvious that Kagan and his ilk are sociopathic psychopaths whose idea’s are so shallow and self serving it’s an insult to those exposed to his mindlessness nonsense. They use the propaganda of psychobabble mindlessness, well knowing that the American public has been brainwashed by the happy talk, pathological sociopathic propaganda of optimistic mindlessness orchestrated by the MSM, especially TV.

‘Projecting power’ is so 20th Century. A simple question to ask is ‘Why the need to?’ Ideas themselves are quickly becoming a powerful weapon, made that more explosive thanks to worldwide insta-communications (which commerce is now very reliant upon). Shutting off the internet has disastrous domestic political effects…like switching off the lights in a last ditch effort to avoid becoming a target. When you keep telling people about the wonders of democracy, freedom, social justice and the rights of the individual, end then your government acts entirely counter to this, then it’s only a matter of time before people wake up and start asking why such noble ideas are being denied them.

Your cuts are no where near what is needed. We simply have no need for a military at all. The only nations that could possibly invade the US (Canada and Mexico) are totally lacking in any military capability at all. Besides our nuclear weapons trump anything out there- there simply is no profit in an attack on the US.

It matters not to us whether Bibi or Abbas or Hamas wins an election in Palestine/Israel. We can trade with either party.

We could save ten trillion out of defense in the next decade if we go back to the days of Grover Cleveland

I might imagine that this group of conservatives would be solicitous enough for the survival of democracy in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan enough to want a military capable of moving to defend and fight for those places. Of course, if you’re just afraid of the Chinese and the North Koreans, that is rank appeasement – and you should own who you are in that case. As the Libyan case demonstrates, people are willing to give up their lives for an idea – but as weapons, ideas have this terrific boomerang quality. One never quite knows whether the insurgents are really and truly “freedom fighters” – or the bad guys in disguise. One argument for direct intervention is that it saves lives as well as advances our values overseas. The very biliousness of the comments raised against what was actually a well-reasoned article by Robert Kagan only demonstrates how weak the paleocon/libertarian world view really is.

I should also point out that the “Eurasian Landmass” is quite a large chunk of real estate, and that the abstract strategic necessity of getting American military forces into a position to where they can influence events on the ground need not say anything about the relative value of interventions in (1) Europe; (2) Africa, (3) The Middle East; (4) South and Central Asia, and (5) East Asia. Those who wish to set strategic priorities among these regions are welcome to do so. Those whose xenophobic kneejerk reaction to any situation within that large area is to avoid engagement at any level need to own their position and take responsibility for the consequences. As it stands, we do not now have an aircraft carrier left in the Mediterranean, to fly cover against Ghaddafi’s Flying Circus, even if we wanted to – the alternative is to rely on our allies to put in air force fighter bomber with aerial refueling to do the job. Thus – the administration just as much as its know-nothing counterparts on the paleocon right have no answer at all to the question of how to effectively intercede against this brutality. This is the wages of strategic wishful thinking and lack of political will.

It is very interesting how those who argue for a military interventionist history refuse to talk about the first 150 years of our history which centered around an export economy and growth when there was no free trade, no social or corporate welfare, no foreign aid.

Today, they ignore free trade and foreign currency manipulation, public service unions, social and corporate welfare, the import economy and the outsourcing of technology and jobs in the economy.

Its unsustainable its like an utter with each of its teets being drained full and no time to replenish the milk.

@ Bill R: As far as “bilious” comments go, the contempt with which “old strategists” such as yourself frame the need to go beyond “abstract strategic necessity” as a reason to fund a ruinous expeditionary foreign policy qualifies as a striking example. Which aspiring hegemon do paleoconservatives wish to “appease”? As for Kagan’s indictment of domestic entitlement spending as the real bogeyman: Isn’t this entitlement spending so untouchable domestically because our reliance on third-world outsourcing of industry (itself a strategic mistake that makes any talk of power projection a self-evident absurdity) has gutted manufacturing as well as introduced a level of job insecurity not seen since the Depression? How much political instability at home could we face if these entitlements are cut precipitously; and how much damage would our defense spending THEN face? For that matter, how will we be able over the next century to combine a first-world industrial economy in MILITARY technology/equipment and a third-world domestic economy based on little more than consumer spending, real estate bubbles, and internet advertising?

China is a monster that we, for the most part, have created ourselves due to our insanely anti-protectionist prejudices (ones shared by far too many all across the political spectrum, including–incredibly–on this site). It’s not appeasement for us to recognize the obvious–we have neither the ability nor the will to thwart Chinese ambitions, certainly not over the long haul (next few decades).

An empire has to pay for itself, else it is worse than unsustainable and positively dangerous at home as well as elsewhere. Does ours?

Re: Bill R.: “I might imagine that this group of conservatives would be solicitous enough for the survival of democracy in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan enough to want a military capable of moving to defend and fight for those places.”

Absolutely not. Are you insane? What is the benefit to the US of defending and fighting for those places? Please be specific.

I am anything but a pacifist, but we should certainly pare back our defense expenditures. Let’s quit “nation building” and make sure our allies are carrying their own weight and only intervene when absolutely necessary..

Kagan wrote a crazed book a few years back, I think the title was Dangerous Nation.
In it, Kagan promulgated the thesis that the USA was always an imperialist nation and recycled the familiar leftist themes of everything that the US ever did was military conquest. He read like Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn. There was no context, everything was a slaughter in favor of our alleged ideals of liberty and equality, two rather contradictory notions
that escaped Kagan’s notice. The neocons love him as do the old fashioned FDR-JFK-HHH-Scoop Jackson socialist welfare Democrats. That breed is thankfully dying out as jerks like
Joey Lieberman are retiring. Even the Democratic faithful are
getting tired of the Pax Americana. Only some of the more retarded GOP voters still favor these endless military adventures as if we have some Divine Right to determine Libya’s government.
Obama sucks bigtime even by leftist standards and that repulsive Billary cretin with her stale-mouthed Methodist moralism needs to go.
But fear not, there are plenty of Dumb Rightists to pick up the FDR-HST-JFK-LBJ-HHH banner and defend every New Deal-Great Society atrocity from the ‘Good’ WW2 to the 1964 Civil Wrongs Act.

The “crunch point”, or the can slamming up against the wall and breaking the ankle of anyone who attempts to kick it further point, is rapidly approaching. When we hit it EVERYTHING – including a sovereign debt default and a possible “Weimar Republic level economic implosion” WILL be on the table.
We spend 40% more than we earn, the cuts WILL come, the only question will be from where.
The United States of Argentina – If we do nothing and continue to play games about our spending problems.

I had to watch the Kagan talk last night with Lamb on CSPAN Q&A (originally aired on 16 Feb 2012). This year old article brought me relief, hope, and the realization that the real intellectuals are hot on Kagan’s trail. There is hope. RP2012!